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Bug#905939: marked as done (tzdata files can get corrupted via write to /etc/localtime)

Your message dated Fri, 17 Aug 2018 11:52:26 +0200
with message-id <20180817095226.GA15563@zira.vinc17.org>
and subject line Re: Bug#905939: tzdata files can get corrupted via write to /etc/localtime
has caused the Debian Bug report #905939,
regarding tzdata files can get corrupted via write to /etc/localtime
to be marked as done.

This means that you claim that the problem has been dealt with.
If this is not the case it is now your responsibility to reopen the
Bug report if necessary, and/or fix the problem forthwith.

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-- 
905939: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=905939
Debian Bug Tracking System
Contact owner@bugs.debian.org with problems
--- Begin Message --- 
Package: tzdata
Version: 2018e-0+deb9u1
Severity: important

On a Debian 9 machine:

patate:~> TZ=UTC date; TZ=UTC0 date
Sun Aug 12 03:02:35 CEST 2018
Sun Aug 12 01:02:35 UTC 2018

The first line is based on the /usr/share/zoneinfo/UTC file according
to strace, but this is wrong as CEST is not UTC. The file is:

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2971 2018-05-15 10:01:38 /usr/share/zoneinfo/UTC

which doesn't seem to be the original one. I assume that it got
corrupted via a write to /etc/localtime, but /etc/localtime is
a symlink to /usr/share/zoneinfo/Etc/UTC, which is itself a
symlink to /usr/share/zoneinfo/UTC.

Now, could the write to /etc/localtime be regarded as a bug?
Probably not, because /etc/localtime is a config file, and one
is allowed to write to config files under /etc.

In short, having a symlink from a file under /etc to a file from
a package does not seem to be correct.

BTW, on https://www.virtualmin.com/node/15246 someone mentioned
another issue with a symlink: "It's not really wise to make
/etc/localtime a symlink. That used to be the standard behavior for
Linux in the past, but then someone realized that /usr/share/zoneinfo
could be on a different volume that's not always mounted, and we
definitely don't want to be without /etc/localtime, [...]"

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 9.5
  APT prefers stable-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 4.9.0-7-amd64 (SMP w/16 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=POSIX, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=POSIX (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

Versions of packages tzdata depends on:
ii  debconf [debconf-2.0]  1.5.61

tzdata recommends no packages.

tzdata suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information

--- End Message ---
--- Begin Message --- 
On 2018-08-13 21:41:51 +0200, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> This came from configuration of ansible:
> 
> - name: Localtime
> shell: cp /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Paris /etc/localtime
> when: ansible_date_time.tz != "CEST" and ansible_date_time.tz != "CET"

It seems that the current version of ansible doesn't contain such code
(not even in documentation), so I'm just closing the bug.

-- 
Vincent Lefèvre <vincent@vinc17.net> - Web: <https://www.vinc17.net/>
100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <https://www.vinc17.net/blog/>
Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / AriC project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)

--- End Message ---
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